My Year of the Racehorse (12 page)

Hoverson, while still the track's sixth-leading rider, is ever mindful that he's in his professional homestretch. Last year at Hastings was supposed to be the final meet for the jock, who had attended steward school in anticipation of an office job in the racing world, but the rough economy pushed him back into the saddle. In the past he would pick up eight or nine mounts in a day; now he takes only five or six to preserve his body. I ask him whether he'll miss racing.

“I'll struggle with it, but I can't do this forever,” he tells me. “To be around these guys, it's my life.”

At this moment, as though to give lie to his homily, another jockey named Dave Wilson strolls by to sass him: “There's a muck sack if I've ever seen one.”

Later on, after heading outside and losing more money, I get a chance to speak with this piss-taking rider before the eighth race. Wilson, who was on the winner for the seventh race, is forty-one and has closely shaven hair, light blue eyes, a pinkish, newborn's complexion, and a buoyant grin. He's been the top rider at Hastings twice and last year won the B.C. Derby, the biggest race of the meet, on a horse that Hoverson had passed on. Yesterday, Wilson rode in all nine races. Today, he's practically a part-timer with six.

A seventeen-year veteran of racing, Wilson was a truck driver and already a young father—“I was young, dumb, and full of come”—when he first entered racing. “I wanted to take an air brakes course to upgrade my licence and the guy that was running the course owned a horse with a trainer. He said, ‘Why do you want to drive a truck? You won't make no money.' So he brought me here. I'd only been on a horse once, but I had the right size and the right temperament: I liked going fast.”

This temperament must also include a taste for pain. Wilson has broken a leg, pulled all the muscles on his ankles, and has been in fights—most recently, this season. “It was over stupid stuff about bumping into somebody, cutting somebody off,” he tells me. “It happened two or three times. We were just beaking at each other for two or three weeks, then we just happened to go.”

“Who won?” I ask, a smile crawling across my face as I imagine two little guys fighting—a windmill blur of wiry muscle, fluorescent fabric, and competitive spite.

Wilson grins. “I'd call it a draw. He may have had the upper hand a bit.”

As we talk, Keveh Nicholls, a twenty-three-year-old rider from Barbados who was on Blackie for her first race of the season, yells something at Wilson. I can't make sense of what he's saying over the chattering of other riders; to my disappointment as a voyeur, they don't seem to be fighting words.

“He's talking to the younger kind of crowd,” beaks Wilson, who's a decade younger than Hoverson.

“Story-telling Dave,” says Nicholls, who's on the tall side for a jockey, has a set of short dread locks on his head, and is wearing yellow and green silks. “Ask him what happened after the first jump,” he says to me, his eyes dancing merrily. “Why was he in my spot?”

I turn to Wilson with a goading, are-you-seriously-going-to-take-that-crap-from-him? expression, but he's smiling:

“It was a good spot to be in.”

TWO DAYS AFTER our conversation at the wedding, the Woman Who Hates Horseracing sends me an email with a video link. “It might help you understand the issue from a more open-minded perspective,” she writes, “if you saw this.”

The video is entitled “Horse Racing: Cruelty Behind the Glamour” and set to sober, urgent piano music. Still images of horses falling face down into tracks or crashing over jumps in steeplechase events as gruesome details flash on title cards: “As pets or in the wild, horses run short distances at high speeds. For races, they are drugged, beaten and given intense training. They are expected to run a mile in under 2 minutes.”

This isn't the first video I've seen like this. Horsemen will say that the bad stuff is rare and far outweighed by the positives. I'm inclined to agree, but still wish the bad stuff weren't so terrifying. Even ardent racing enthusiasts shudder at the memory of high-profile thoroughbreds like 2006 Derby winner Barbaro and 2008 Derby runner-up Eight Belles breaking down on the track, or of other, less celebrated horses being euthanized in hastily erected tents on the oval. A close-up photo of Barbaro's leg snapping while leaving the gate at the Preakness is memorably horrific.

Economics and the larceny of some horsemen also figure into the anti-racing argument. The 1986 Kentucky Derby and 1987 Breeders' Cup Classic winner Ferdinand was sent to slaughter in 2002 by his owners in Japan when his stud fees were no longer paying for his upkeep. Seventies champion Alydar, a successful studhorse, was murdered to collect a $20 million insurance payout in 1990.

That said, the trouble with this kind of video is how facts and statistics are used, without proper context, in the service of an eight-year-old's worldview. You could make a similar video, with equally gut-twisting images and misleading factoids, about dogs biting children and construct an emotionally persuasive case against dog ownership. You could screen images of unhappy kids and list a string of appalling statistics about child abuse to argue against human reproduction. These are only slightly more exaggerated examples of this onscreen rhetoric.

I doubt anyone who made this video has seen the kindness and devotion lavished on thoroughbreds I've witnessed firsthand. So I take exception with the video's suggestion that the only solution to eliminating racing fatalities is by banning the sport—with its tradition, culture, and economy—altogether. It's worth arguing that there aren't enough safeguards in the sport, but the racing industry has taken measures to enhance the welfare of the animals: reportedly safer artificial racing surfaces are required in California and a padded “Smurf” whip is employed at Woodbine in Toronto.

Another argument horsemen make is that thoroughbreds actually want to race; those who don't are quickly sent away from the track and turned into riding horses. In some ways, thoroughbreds are like the jockeys themselves: both destined to be in the sport by the circumstances of their birth (i.e., the stature of the jockeys, the lineage of the horses), but also by their temperaments. A true racehorse lives for the daily stimulation of training and the excitement that only comes from racing; if some breeds of horses are like Labrador retrievers, the thoroughbred is the equine equivalent of a border collie—an animal that's flummoxed and thwarted by the idea of sitting around, doing nothing.

This is the line of reasoning Randi uses. Obviously I am no expert on horses, but I'm certain the horses in Randi's stable aren't miserable. Even the mere suggestion that she somehow partakes in the cruelty of animals is personally offensive.

“I remember being a kid and finding out about the seal hunt and being so upset I wrote a letter to a government official,” Randi says when I tell her about the Woman Who Hates Horseracing. “I still have it somewhere. It's so funny. I mean, life sucks—deal with it.”

In the stables at the track, floor fans are blasting in front of each stall, whipping back the manes and forelocks of Randi's horses and making them seem as though they're stars in a video for an eighties hair band like Cinderella or Mr. Big.

“You could die crossing the street,” Randi adds. “At least they're not bored here. The worst life for a horse is being rented out for everyone to ride. Those fuckers hate that shit.”

“You mean, for birthday parties and shit?” I ask.

“You know, when you put on a bunch of people who don't know what the fuck they're doing, they're fucking miserable,” she says. “They can't wait to be finished. It's just the same as having a job.”

It's not hard to see why Randi would consider boredom the utmost act of cruelty.

“It's like getting a racehorse to deliver the mail,” I say.

Randi laughs. “I like that.”

SOMETIME AFTER THIS conversation, I find myself assigned to write a magazine story about the killing of wild horses in the foothills of Sundre, Alberta. It's a story I pitch partly because of my experiences at the track.

After flying into Calgary, I travel an hour and a half north to Sundre to meet the founders of the Wild Horses of Alberta Society, Doreen and Bob Henderson. Bob, a retired twenty-six-year veteran of the Calgary police, has blue-grey eyes that draw in when he smiles; Doreen has dark hair with highlights splashed across her bangs and a pinhead-sized nose stud. As Bob drives out of Sundre proper, the hills in the distance are covered with dirty-blond grass with patches of snow like dandruff.

For the Hendersons, a shared passion for horses is the linchpin to their marriage. “We came from different persuasions,” Bob tells me from behind the wheel. “I have a police background and am a country cowboy. She was a city girl—a headbanger, a rock 'n' roll queen.”

Doreen learned to ride as a child. “I got away from horses until I met Bob,” she explains. “Then I bought my own and we started our life together. We're both horse-crazy.”

The Hendersons fell in love with the wild horses on their long rides through these hills and have two rescued “wildies” on their acreage. They formed their group in 2002, after learning that someone had shot, cut, and gutted two horses. Since those murders, there have been a total of thirty known killings of these animals.

There are three hundred or so wild horses in the Sundre foothills. Bob and Doreen believe they carry traces of the Spanish mustangs brought to North America in the 1500s and cite an 1808 diary entry by explorer David Thompson describing the horses in the area. The Alberta government, however, asserts that the wild horses are descendants of domesticated equines from the turn of the twentieth century. Their official position is that the horses are not actually wild, but feral—domesticated animals that have gone un-tame and have intruded upon a landscape. In other words, they're as foreign as the white men they helped settle this area.

Almost an hour into our drive, in Parker Ridge, about twenty-five miles from Banff National Park, Bob hits the brakes. “There's one in the woods,” he says, as the car comes to a full stop on a logging road. “There's another.”

I struggle to catch sight of them, but then the horses advance up through the grove of pine trees and squirt out onto the road, maybe a half-furlong in front of us.

We step outside the car. The horses, shaggy in their winter coats like plush animals, are shorter and smaller than the thoroughbreds I've become familiar with, but their chests are wider and their hindquarters are thicker. Wild horses travel in bands—a stallion, his harem of mares, and their foals—that rarely number over a dozen; they're often stalked by bachelor herds of young male horses that haven't yet started their own families. There are six horses in this band, including a foal.

The horses watch us with low-key curiosity, and as Bob takes photos with a zoom lens the size of a pepper grinder, I hide my moistening eyes behind my own camera. The band, following the lead of the boss mare, turn their backs towards us and run down the road, before melting into the forest again. The stallion, who will defend his band from bears, coyotes, wolves, and cougars, stays on the road, snorting and puffing at us.

“He's saying, ‘Stand back,'” Doreen tells me. “‘Keep away.'”

“They normally hang around longer,” Bob says as the stallion leaves sight. “They're worried about the foal. But you can see how they will linger around people.”

“We wish they were more distrustful,” Doreen says. “They'd have a better chance of survival.”

“How can anyone say they're not wild?” Bob asks me.

That day, we'll see a few more bands of horses, closer up and of varying numbers. We'll also pay our respects to the skeletal remains of a stallion murdered the previous December in a clearing by the road. For me, nothing underscores the difference between the so-called abuses at the racetrack and the undeniable cruelty of a wild animal murdered for pleasure than the sight of the slaughtered horse's tail lying on the other side of the road, carried and dropped there by a coyote.

And yet the image of that first band of horses rattles in my head for days afterwards. I was startled by the emotion that those horses inspired in me. At the sight of something so wonderful, I was reminded of the chain of events that led me here, beginning with my decision to buy a racehorse. If you asked me a year earlier what I'd be doing now, I'd never have guessed I'd be here. How could I?

NORMALLY, ON A Friday night race, Randi takes the day off from the post office to save herself a workday that runs from daybreak until midnight. But earlier that week she got into an argument with her supervisor for—you won't fucking believe it—swearing. Complaining about Randi swearing, of course, is like complaining about anyone else for blinking.

“I wasn't fucking swearing at him, just swearing, but he sent me to the principal's office,” she explains to me before Blackie's race in her break room. “So I went to the doctor and he went, ‘What do you want—stress leave?' We looked at the calendar and I said, ‘September 5th.' And he said, ‘Okay.' So, I didn't work today—and it was cool.”

As Randi gets the horse ready, I return to the frontside to meet Harris and his family. Even while the stadium lights breathe away the darkness on the oval, there's still a ribbon of amber in the sky at Hastings. Typically, a summer night in the city is capped off with a cool breeze—cardigan weather for some—but this week in July the air is warm and flat.

Actually, it's Angie who shows up first, with Liam and Jack in tow. Jack, in seersucker shorts and a white T-shirt, keeps holding his mother's hand, because he's both fascinated by and terrified of the horses.

“He's been talking about coming here all week,” Angie tells me, as her younger son, four, buries his head against her cardigan-wrapped waist, only to peek at the horses circling the paddock. “You know how shy he is, but he loves horses. And Liam's excited about betting.”

Liam was initially promised a $5 wager on Blackie before successfully lawyering for the chance to bet on a race where he could actually pick the winner. The seven-year-old doesn't seem to take notice of the horses, but instead asks for my copy of the Form. “What are these numbers?” he asks, looking up from the broadsheet in the oversized nerd-scientist glasses that he insists on wearing. He points to a row of numbers in the statistics. “Here.”

“The Beyer Speed number.”

“What does that mean?” he asks.

The figure, which accounts for variables like track condition and rail biases, requires a complicated explanation that I cannot supply. “It says how fast the horse goes,” I say instead.

He frowns at me, hoisting his lower lip the way his father does when paying the bill. “But if you know how fast the horse goes,” he says, “then why doesn't everyone bet on the horse with the highest number?”

That's a question I'd like patiently and repeatedly explained myself. I could bumble through an overview of pace and trip handicapping, but I shudder in anticipation of the inevitable follow-up questions. “Well, there are other important factors to consider,” I eventually say. “Like the shininess of the horses' coats, and the colour of the jockey's silks.”

“You don't know, do you?”

“No,” I say. “But do you guys want something to drink or a Popsicle?”

“Okay,” he says in a tone that suggests that he will not be easily placated. “Do they have red-bean soup Fudgsicles?”

Jack pulls himself away from his mother to nod approvingly. “I want one, too.”

I look to Angie, to see if they're kidding. Growing up, I felt that red-bean soup as a dessert was some kind of culturally sanctioned prank on Chinese children. Angie bounces back my puzzled face. “I have to drive half an hour out of my way to find red-bean treats,” she tells me. “We live in a different age.”

To the kids' visible disappointment, we settle for regular Popsicles, then slip into the paddock before Blackie's race. “What's keeping Harris?” I ask Angie.

“He's showing a house in Deep Cove,” she explains.

“The market's picking up again,” I say. It's a phrase that has begun to ping across the city like a chain letter.

“At least he's busy,” she says. “Otherwise he gets existential.”

The rapport I have with my friends' wives doesn't extend far beyond pleasantries. Give me two minutes, after all, and I'm waxing on about horse junk. For that reason, I'm not part of Angie and Harris's dinner-party circuit. As Angie watches Liam, who refuses to hold her hand in public, I grow anxious about the awkward silence looming ahead.

“Did Harris ever tell you my grandfather owned racehorses in Fort Erie?” she asks me. “I love horses.”

The impression Harris gave me was that she disapproved of the sport. “I didn't know that.”

“I kept telling Harris to buy into the horse with you, but he wouldn't. He thought he'd never get his money back.”

“Oh.”

She reads my face like a picture book. “Did he tell you a different story?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“He did, didn't he?” She says “didn't he?” in a way that makes me feel like a squirming seven-year-old caught in a lie.

“Okay, yes,” I admit. “He said you wouldn't let him buy into Blackie.”

She shakes her head. “He's always blaming me for things.”

“So,” I say, recalling an earlier conversation, “does that also mean that you're not the one making him get a vasectomy?”

Angie ducks sheepishly. “Well, no—that one actually does fall on me. But my point still holds.”

We watch Randi saddle Blackie and give her instructions to Perez. After her last victory, the mare has been bumped up to a higher price, $7,500. The reasoning behind this is that any horse who's claimed is placed in a “jail term,” which means a horse's new owners are forced to race her one level above her purchase price for a month-long period—this keeps the owners of a claimed horse from immediately claiming that horse back at the same price, and then vice versa. The $7,500 level is a reasonable jump for a sharp horse like Blackie, but if she were purchased, she would need to race against horses at the $12,500 level, where she'd be outclassed; other trainers should know this and back off from the horse.

We leave the paddock to find a spot to watch the race. On the apron, by the eight pole—the pole that marks the point one furlong away from the finish line—I run into Nick, who's supposed to be at the football game scalping tickets for extra dough.

“Game just ended,” he tells me.

“How did you do?”

“I made a hundred and seventy bucks. I just bought them off people on the street who had extra tickets. It's about three hours of work.”

“Not bad,” I say.

“Not bad,” he repeats, folding his bottom lip up. At first he seems proud of his hourly wage, but as he chews the inside of his mouth, his face drops. “Well, it's not quite enough.”

The gates flap out, and the horses bust through like drunks thrown out of a saloon. Coming out of the four hole, Blackie starts well, lying third at the clubhouse turn, with Angel Came Down, a horse who beat her earlier this year, out front. “Don't get goofy,” Nick shouts to the horse. “Just sit there.” The first quarter goes fast—22.2—as the pace horse stretches his lead to three lengths. “They're just flying up front. She's getting shuffled back, I guess.” But Blackie hangs in there with the horse in second, Notis Me, and at the top of the turn, the three horses are knotted together like a bunch of bananas.

Angel Came Down starts running out of gas and Blackie is in second.

“Come on!” Nick screams. “Dig, dig!”

Perez lowers the reins on the horse, encouraging the colt to let loose, going to a half cross—holding the reins in one hand—and swatting the horse with his whip. His stance changes and he crouches lower. If a jockey just sits there with his lines dangling, he's a passenger. What a jockey does in the back half of the race, when the horse is “sent”—allowed to go full speed— is to physically push his horse and help him lengthen his stride. It's at this point that the rider stretches out from a “7” stance into a Superman flying mode. An analogy I read somewhere compares this motion to a child pumping his feet on a swing.

With Perez pushing her, Blackie seems to be gaining on Notis Me, who's racing inside, midway down the stretch. The two horses seem locked into each other, as though in a tango, neither wanting to cede ground to the other. But then another horse, Our Gin Girl, a relative long shot at thirteen to one, slingshots towards them on the outside. She moves beside Blackie, who looks surprised, thrown off by the interloper at her flank, and lets up on her acceleration.

“NOTIS ME, MOCHA TIME, HERE'S OUR GIN GIRL... OUR GIN GIRL TO SCORE.”

I bet $10 across—win, place, and show—on Blackie, so make back part of my original bet. Liam shrewdly placed his $5 wager on the horse to show and actually turns a profit. Harris calls Angie to say he can't make it, so I bring his family into the backstretch without him, feeling too much like a substitute English teacher forced to lead a group of school kids, at the last minute, on a tour of a historic battleship—I'm not sure whether to say nothing or make things up. Jack's mouth hangs open at all the horses watching us from their stalls. Liam's excited about the easy cash in his hand.

As Blackie is hosed down and walked, Randi gives Jack and Liam carrots to feed the horses and introduces her current roster of horses. Unlike many trainers, who merely shorten a racehorse's longwinded official name in the barn, Randi takes pains to create personalized tags for her wards. There's Amy (a.k.a. Island Hopper Chopper), the horse in rehab (as in Amy Winehouse, who sang about going to a different kind of rehab); the Girl (Aubrey Road), a three-year-old filly brought in by Randi's friend Ardenne who stood funny when she first came in; Riley (Uncle Geno, named after Randi's Uncle Geno), whom Randi bred and owns outright, but who is injured and has never raced and stomps his front hoof all the time—“not because he's mean, but because he's bored”; May (Athena Estates), who was scratched from her most recent race because of a cough; and then Sylvester.

“I told my friend one time, ‘Jesus, I'm going to have to go bankrupt and kill myself,' and the next day he won,” Randi tells everyone. “He's made about a hundred grand. I like to think of him as the hero. But just not lately—right, Sylvester?”

The horse bobs his head like a Texas oil derrick, but settles down when I offer him a carrot. I like Sylvester a lot. Randi wonders whether his dip in performance isn't because the track's racing surface is harder than it has been in previous years or whether it's because the track has banned the use of hormones on horses for fear of negative publicity. (Randi insists that the steroids help the horses heal quickly and eat better.)

“Sylvester's always the hero,” I tell everyone. “She's Randi's favourite.”

As I say this, Alex brings Blackie back from around the centre aisle and into her shed, and all the attention turns to my horse, the pretty black mare who's run well enough to win, even if she fell short. The horse lets herself be patted, something she doesn't always do, and happily gobbles up the carrots that are offered to her, one by one. I turn to see Sylvester. How would it feel to be replaced as the hero, to be supplanted by a lesser horse having a better season? He's still whipping his head up and down, but no one notices anymore.

“There were many doubters as I strode against the moving walkway of conventional wisdom towards wealth, recognition, and immediate and delayed gratification. From this comes a prime lesson: never be afraid to try something that others may think is stupid or outlandishly weird.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then innovation can be a swordfish crème brûlée. An innovator lets the end guide the means, even when those demands resemble a pregnant woman's cravings or an Iron Chef's fever dream.

It was with this attitude in mind that my racing endeavours brought me to a woman who claimed to speak to animals...”

FROM CHAPTER THREE, The Winning Ticket Inside You

Carole Serene is a tall woman with curly, reddish-brown hair cut just above her ears and has a warm, throaty laugh. When we meet outside the city at a fish and chips place by the water, halfway between her place and mine, she's wearing sandals, a houndstooth blouse, a long skirt, and black onyx jewellery. She breeds and trains Irish wolfhounds and belongs to a Jaguar car club. For her day job, she works for a food broker, putting a manufacturer's products into supermarkets. Before that, she worked in the pet food industry.

Since 1991, Carole Serene has also been a spiritual medium, channeller, and animal communicator. Her work, she tells me, is possible through the assistance of the spirit energy Seth, who first communicated through psychic Jane Roberts. Roberts, who “crossed over” in 1984, published the ancient spirit's channelled thoughts in a series of books known as the “Seth Material.” Carole, whom I found online, transmits Seth's thoughts through a kind of automatic writing on pen and paper and has been looking for a publisher for her own channelled writings from the spirit energy—“It pertains to environmental issues of our time,” she says—but when she wrote Roberts's publisher, she was sent a cease-and-desist letter.

“How can you copyright a spirit?” I ask her.

“Thank you. I rest my case,” she tells me. “They claim that Seth said he'd never speak through anyone else. But Seth told me that he told her that he would never speak the words he spoke to Jane Roberts to another. So those topics are off the table, but we're dealing instead with today's environmental crisis.”

Through Seth, Carole can offer guidance to people looking for answers to their personal problems. In a two-hour session, people will ask Seth questions, which he'll answer in writing by Carole's hand. “Sometimes, women come to find out when they will find Mr. Right,” she tells me. “That's very shallow, but I understand it's important to them. So we address and move through that into what's really important to them in their lifetime. For some people, it's art—the fulfillment of their talents. We all have some talent, but we don't always have the confidence to share it with the world.”